Tag Archives: gamer

Quite an active week for articles so I’ll get right to it. This week saw discussion on the value of the terms ‘gamer and ‘gaming community’, discussions about violence and purpose, institutionalized racism, and a fair bit on BioShock Infinite.

Links and articles that contain minor spoilers (minor narrative beats or gameplay segments, etc.) will be marked with a *. Those with major spoilers (major plot twists or story beats) will be marked with a **.

Brendan Keogh shared a blog post in response to both, focussing on the term not as a self-identifier but as a signifier informed by broader culture. On the point Keogh makes about male being the assumption, I’d like to draw in the now-faded identifier of ‘girl-gamer’ since that was expressly in reaction to the exclusionary connotations embedded within ‘gamer.’ It’s great that now we can reference a variety of studies to show that a significant portion of people who enjoy games are women, but it also makes me a little bit sad that we would even need a near 1:1 split of women to men to fuel putting a stop to ‘gamer’ as a term of exclusion. Although ‘girl-gamer’ has fallen out of fashion, ‘gamer’ is still a term implying legitimization or delegitimization of character.

From earlier in the month, Cara Ellison wrote on Unwinnable about the loneliness of adventure games. I’ll be linking you shortly to a great little adventure game that really carries through on this sentiment.

Games

Only a wee handful of games this week but every one of them is well worth your time for different reasons. First is The Linear RPG by Sophie Houldon. You can use left and right to run across a line, and as you progress right two things happen: you lose health but gain experience (representing an automated battle system), and the crappy story unfolds behind the gameplay. It’s delightfully cynical of jrpgs. But it also says something to me about the relevance of the scale of a game’s systems, because ultimately that can be a relevant factor in a player’s enjoyment – Liza Daly’s piece flashes to mind.

Next up is Mind Game by gert_johnny. No joke, this is what I wanted out of Remember Me. It’s a little difficult to extract memories and I wasn’t able to complete the game but the simple execution of its mechanic makes for some design notes worth considering. Most notably, how to implement telepathy without automating it to ‘does telepathy.’

Lastly is Good Morning, Commander by alllen, which is pretty much Moon: The Game. Be sure to turn down your volume before clicking that link! It doesn’t run too smoothly on my laptop which made it a little bit of a trial to play – hopefully you’ll find it easier to handle. This is the one that stirred me with loneliness, and from that a prevailing sense of dread. I adore that it wasn’t afraid to fill the world with so much empty space, risking boredom, but survived by filling that space with the beating of my heart, my fears, my wandering thoughts.